French ex-hostages: Press must continue in Afghanistan

Stéphane
Taponier and Hervé Ghesquière, the two France 3 journalists held captive by the
Taliban for 547 days, had a big surprise when they entered the France
Télévisions building Thursday afternoon, a few hours after landing at the
military base of Villacoublay, close to Paris, where they were welcomed by
President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Hundreds of
employees packed the halls, alleys, and galleries of this glass building
anchored along the Seine, the heart of France's sprawling public broadcasting
system. They made their way through the crowd like rock stars, kissing, hugging
and shaking hands. Never in the rowdy history of French journalism' s hostage
crises was a homecoming as intense and massive.

It was
bound to be like that. France Télévisions, the umbrella for the national
network France 2, the regional network France 3, half-a dozen radio stations,
Radio France internationale and France 24, forms "une grande famille", a large
family where journalists and staff from all public channels claim to belong not
only to a company but to a particular "school" of public service journalism.

Barely
hiding their emotions Stéphane and Hervé had all the right words and pushed all
the right buttons. They thanked everyone: the military and the secret services,
the support committees, their colleagues and families. They calmly described
their captivity ("we were not abused"), complained about the "Afghan mountain
cuisine" ("please no more rice and red beans") and underlined their addiction
to two small radio sets that were tuned to the BBC and RFI, their flimsy links
to the real world. "We heard about bin Laden's killing. We discussed it with our
captors who first thought it was U.S. propaganda and then said, when they had
to accept the truth, 'We are not Al-Qaeda, we are Taliban!'"

However the
overwhelming presence of France Télévisions staff and top brass was also a
clear message addressed to the French government. They wanted to remind
everyone and especially state officials that Hervé and Stéphane were not loose
cannons or irresponsible "yellow kids" as Sarkozy and his entourage had implied, but
seasoned and reasonable journalists who knew how to assess risk before
embarking on a dangerous assignment.

More
fundamentally perhaps they showed up en masse to reaffirm the importance of
independent journalism. France has been struggling for decades with the
government's endemic temptation to consider public television as an appendage
of the state. This system was profoundly shaken and revamped in the 1980s when
public service journalists largely gained their independence from the
government. However in recent years they have come under irascible pressure
again, particularly under Sarkozy, who
has regularly been accused of political interference in public media.
Inevitably the controversy on the "irresponsibility" of the two France 3
reporters was also seen in that context, as a battle for the soul of public
television.

The first
words of Hervé Ghesquière were meant to dispel any hint that he and his
colleague had been reckless. "We did not try to climb the Northern face of the
Everest with tongs and in shorts", he said. "We took all the precautions that
were needed. We were never warned by the army. We were just unlucky, the
victims probably of a Taliban fighter who had infiltrated one of the
checkpoints on the road and warned the hostage takers of our arrival".

Contrary to
other previous abductions, the Taponier and Ghesquière saga had turned into a
tug-of-war between the state and the press on the right to decide what to cover
and how to cover it. According the newspaper La Croix, the Elysée Palace and the Army were incensed because the
abduction seemed to confirm to the world, as the U.S. army had complained, that
the French contingent did not sufficiently control the region in the Kapisa
province, east of Kabul, where they had been deployed. For months the tensions
were rife between government officials who appeared determined to keep the case
under the lid and the families and press freedom groups who wanted to campaign
publicly as they had done it successfully for previous hostages.

Taponier
and Ghesquière said the Paris controversies that roiled their first months of
detention were closed now. They avoided another contentious question--whether a
ransom had been paid--and they made it eminently clear that they wanted to go
back as soon as possible to their passion and mission--news reporting.

On Thursday,
in the middle of their colleagues and live on France 2 and France 3, the two
freed hostages "gave a lesson in journalism," wrote the daily Libération. It had a clear message to
all: "We must continue to go to Iraq and Afghanistan and we must not always be
embedded with the army."

"Our honor,"
added Thierry Thuillier, France Télévisions top news director, "is to go in the
field and we'll continue to do so."

On Thursday
afternoon in the halls of France Télévisions there were tears of joy but also
that steely look of journalists determined to do their job without fear or
favor.

CPJ Europe Representative Marthoz is a Belgian journalist and longtime press freedom and human rights activist. He teaches international journalism at the Université catholique de Louvain and is a columnist for the Belgian daily Le Soir.